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Tag Archives: tattoo lettering

​My worst quality and greatest fault…I am…intense. Positioned on my tattooed right forearm, next to ‘grateful’ and ‘fallible’…and the word my eight year old daughter chose and wrote for me – But more about that in another post.

‘Intense’ is awful, it means that it’s easy to live in your head.

It means that you over analyse, you’re hyper sensitive, and that you see things many others don’t. It means you are often too self aware, too self critical, and too intuitively conscious of other people. It means that you feel deeply, experience fully, and are prone to anxiety.

You’re incredibly hard on yourself.

You think too deeply when others see things and situations at face value. It means that you often have unrealistic expectations of others.

It means that criticism from others is a very tough thing to internalize.

BUT….intense is also one of my greatest attributes…paradoxically for many of the reasons stated above, and for other reasons too… it means that I can understand others, feel and relate to their emotions.

It means that I am a deep thinker and question life, I’m creative, that I can write, and paint, and express.

It means that I can understand and speak of deep and vulnerable things that others can relate to but that not everyone can speak about to their closest circle, let alone to strangers.

It means that I am both my own worst enemy and my own best friend all rolled up into one.

It is something my friends admire and love about me, but at the same time frequently despair about me.

Some days I hate the gift…some days I am extremely grateful for the gift.

It is part of my human condition. It is a quality I need to temper and control so that it doesn’t control me. I know that as I continue to develop my sense of self worth I will feel the negative impacts less, as much of the behaviour lies in deep personal insecurities.

It’s a constant and very real struggle, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.